


Can Someone Tell Me (If It's Wrong)

by merle_p



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: (Except not really because they are adopted), (Except not really because they have traveled back in time), Complicated Relationships, Complicated Timeline, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally stunted man-children in teenage bodies, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Underage Relationship(s), M/M, Post-Canon, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-06 03:35:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17932085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merle_p/pseuds/merle_p
Summary: "Your favorite,” he adds, unnecessarily but correctly, because leave it to Klaus of all people to know what kind of candy he prefers. He is pretty sure not even Eudora ever had any clue just how much he liked the taste of the rainbow.





	Can Someone Tell Me (If It's Wrong)

**Author's Note:**

> So … I have been on a three-year hiatus from fandom because I was busy dealing with my own personal kind of apocalypse … figures that the Umbrella Academy would be the show that gives me too many feelings that just ask to be channeled into fic. Well. I am not sure what I was doing here – I felt that Diego, Klaus, and Ben were in need of some comfort, and couldn’t quite decide whether to go down the Diego/Klaus or the Klaus/Ben rabbit hole, and so I decided to do both and somehow this turned into an enormously sappy little piece from Diego’s POV with a lot of slashy undercurrents and not a lot of actual action. Sorry. Also, while I am apologizing: If there’s someone whose comment or message through AO3 or LJ or tumblr I really should have responded to while I was gone, I am truly sorry. This one is for you. 
> 
> Title taken from the lyrics of "Mad About You" by Hooverphonic, which is part of the Umbrella Academy Soundtrack.

At the end of the day (a day that started with the end of the world, a day that happened and still, as of this moment, is yet to happen), Diego finds himself staring up at the ceiling of his old childhood bedroom, chasing sleep that remains impossibly elusive. It doesn’t help that the bed he’s lying in feels wrong and too small, not unlike the body his consciousness is currently trapped in. He is dead tired, exhausted to the bone, but every time he closes his eyes, the images return: Eudora’s lifeless body, the mutilated corpse of Harold Jenkins, Allison in a pool of her own blood, Vanya playing the violin at the center of an iris of gleaming white light … and over and over again, Mom waving goodbye to them with a smile from the second floor kitchen window as the walls of the Academy start to crumble and collapse around her.

He thinks he is starting to have an idea of why Klaus craves the mind-numbing comfort of drugs so much, if this night is any indication of what being haunted by ghosts feels like. 

He doesn’t know how the others did it. How they shook everything off, just snapped to attention the moment they walked into the lobby of the Academy and were greeted by the cold disapproval in their father’s voice as he reprimanded them for missing their curfew. How they simply hung their heads and quietly went to their separate rooms, as if this was a regular day in their childhood, as if their minds had not lived through a decade of turmoil and trauma their young-again bodies have not experienced yet. As if they hadn’t just witnessed the moon collapsing onto the Earth. 

Logically, he knows that it was a tactical retreat – that they’ll regroup tomorrow, sort out whatever happened to them, make a plan for stopping the apocalypse this second time around. In the moment though, looking at their backs as they all slunk down the hallway, putting distance between each other, he couldn’t quite help but feel irrationally abandoned, and it’s a feeling he hasn’t been able to shake off since. To make things worse, the anger at his father – the low-burning fire that had fueled his actions for almost as long as he can remember – is closer to the surface again, less a never-dying piece of ember and more an active volcano about to erupt. His hands are itching for the cold and comforting weight of his knives, but he supposes it’s better not to give in to the urge, because he can’t trust himself tonight not to do something ill-advised, like drive one of the gleaming blades through his father’s eye into that cynical brain of his and put a stop to everything that’s yet to come, right here and now. 

He rolls himself over to face the wall, then over again on the other side, and finally heaves a sigh as he swings his feet over the edge of the bed, his toes just barely skimming the cold hardwood floor. Damnit. For a moment he had almost forgotten that this body hasn’t had his last growth spurt yet. 

The house is dark and quiet as he slinks down the hallway towards the main staircase, past Mom, who is vacantly staring at 17th-century art as she recharges, once again unmarred and whole. As he forces himself to turn his gaze away from her, however, he realizes that there is a light shining out from underneath Ben’s bedroom door, and that is enough of an unexpected sight to make him come to a stop. He knows, logically, that Ben is indeed inside that room right now, moving and breathing, and yet … for years, there had been no light inside that room, no body sleeping in that bed, no one sitting at his desk or pushing the curtains aside in the morning. After Ben’s death, everyone had given his room a wide berth, had pretended, as if by silent agreement, that the door wasn’t there, as if they could will it from existence to stop serving as a constant reminder of what they had lost. 

Only once, Diego had snuck back into the house at some ungodly hour, returning from a date with a girl that had somehow turned into a bar fight, a tissue pressed against his face to soak up the blood from a cut in his lip. He had found Klaus on the floor in front of Ben’s room, curled up against the doorframe, in a pair of lavender satin pajamas, fast asleep, or more likely passed out from whatever drug he had used to ease the path into oblivion. Diego had paused to watch him sleep, and for a moment, the constant rage burning in his chest had made room for a sheer unbearable ache, a wave of grief over every precious little moment in his young life that had inevitably slipped through his fingers and turned to dust. He felt torn between letting himself sink down on the floor next to Klaus to rest the back of his head against Ben’s locked bedroom door, and bending down to push one of those stubborn curls away from Klaus’ forehead, but in the end he had done neither and simply continued on his way to his room. A few days later, Klaus had disappeared without as much as a goodbye, faded away into the night, leaving behind a closet full of hidden feather boas, mesh tops, and fishnet tights. Their father, if he noticed his absence, hardly seemed to care enough to react, and a couple of weeks later, Diego packed up his things as well and didn’t look back. 

But all that had happened a long time ago (or rather, from his current outlook, would not be happening for several years), and this time, Diego does not walk away from the door. He doesn’t knock before reaching for the handle, but when he pushes the door open and peaks inside, the sight that greets him makes him think that perhaps he better should have. 

Ben (living, breathing, sweet little Ben) is stretched out on his back on the bed, one arm behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. His pose oddly mirrors the one Diego himself was in just fifteen minutes ago – except for the fact that the fingers of Ben’s right hand are tangled in a fistful of Klaus’ blond curls, whose head is resting on Ben’s chest, his body curled up over and around Ben like a human blanket. 

It takes Diego a moment to process what he is seeing, but only a second longer to understand: This is Klaus listening to Ben’s beating heart. This is Ben touching his brother’s perpetually messy, silky hair. This is them, making up for a decade of not being able to hear, see, feel, touch, except for their encounters in the ethereal dark space between the worlds where Klaus’ mind goes to see those who have died. Ben is not smiling (he rarely did as a child), but his face is relaxed, for once devoid of the tight haunted look Diego remembers seeing on him in the months before he died. Klaus’ face is hidden in Ben’s sweater, but Diego can tell he’s awake from the way his bare feet are wandering aimlessly alongside the end of the bed, entwining with Ben’s legs for a moment before reemerging and continuing on their journey, the only indication of the restlessness that seems to drive Klaus in every waking moment and often in his sleep. 

There is something incredibly intimate about the sight, and Diego marvels at how something can look somehow so unsettlingly wrong and entirely natural all at once. 

With sudden urgency, he is hit by the thought that he was never meant to witness this, that he is not supposed to be here. He quickly steps back to pull the door closed again but moves too hastily: A floorboard creaks, and two heads fly up at the sudden noise. Looking at their round, young faces as they stare back at him, he has the strangest sense of a twice-false déjà-vu: here are his brothers, still children, still healthy and safe, in an era before everything went to shit, looking the way they did that time when he caught them sneaking liquor-filled chocolates from the kitchen – and yet, their eyes are much older than that, heavy with the experiences and knowledge they all share. They are the eyes of men not easily surprised, and most of all, the eyes of men who have no fucks left to give. 

“Can’t sleep?” Ben says, his voice calm and even, but not hostile, a little curious maybe. To his embarrassment, Diego feels his throat close up, and he knows before he tries that the next words out of his mouth are going to fall apart in a stutter. 

He settles for a shrug, a defensive move, feeling lost and out of his depth. 

“W-was going to – to m-make a sandwich.”

“Hm,” Ben nods, all serious, as if Diego had made some important announcement rather than an obviously evasive half-lie, but Klaus suddenly looks mischievous. He twists around on the bed not unlike a snake slithering across a rock, without ever breaking contact with Ben, and reaches for something buried in the pillows. When he extracts his hand again, he is holding a crinkling plastic bag up in Diego’s direction with a dazzlingly triumphant smile. 

“We have something better!” he says cheerfully. “We have snacks. There are Skittles. Your favorite,” he adds, unnecessarily but correctly, because leave it to Klaus of all people to know what kind of candy he prefers. He is pretty sure not even Eudora ever had any clue just how much he liked the taste of the rainbow. 

“I –“ he starts, breathless all of a sudden with a fierce surge of _want_ , and the candy’s got nothing to do with it. 

This sense of want is nothing new. He hasn’t felt it this strongly in a while, although if he’s being truly honest with himself, it had made a predictably regular reappearance on the rare occasions he ran into Klaus over the years, every time he felt his brother’s wild, hopeful, desperate smile directed at him, for all that it was muted and twisted by grief, starvation, cheap tequila, and drugs. But it had been a familiar companion in his childhood, a little flame leaping high every time he came across Klaus and Ben huddled together over a book, or winding daisy chains in the park on a sunny day, wrapped up in their little comforting bubble of joy. But even back then, he knew he was not supposed to be like them – Klaus and Ben, the sensitive ones, the childish ones, the ones that needed looking after, a constant disappointment to their father. No, Diego was supposed to be like the rest, like One and Three and Five: ambitious, pragmatic, determined, strong. So he learned to suppress the longing, learned to ignore the sensation of their curious gazes between his shoulder blades as he walked away, learned to be dismissive and patronizing in his words and actions, until he felt them retreat from him, bit by bit, wary and resigned. 

But the events of the past days, from his father’s death to the impending apocalypse, have left scratches in his diligently constructed armor that he has not yet had time to repair, and standing in this room with the weight of their gazes drilling into his heart brings back all the carefully buried feelings of need and longing, stronger than ever. 

And here they are, inviting him in, offering him … something, he doesn’t know what, perhaps just candy and a bit of company, but it doesn’t matter, because even a handful of Skittles somehow feels more than he deserves, and it’s not like he’s got anywhere better to be. 

“Stay,” Ben says quietly, carefully, and if he hadn’t been sure before, the calm certainty in Ben’s voice seals it. He walks into the room and gingerly lets himself down on the edge of the bed, near the foot and out of reach, careful not to touch either of them, careful not to look at them either, until a bony toe pokes him in the thigh, making him jump. 

“Catch,” Klaus says in warning, and he grabs the bright-red plastic pouch that Klaus tosses at him out of the air with impeccable aim. Instead of tearing into the candy, however, he gives himself permission to look at them, and oh God, Klaus is somehow still wound around Ben’s body, whose hands have found their way back into Klaus’ messy hair, tugging and twisting, dirty-blond curls winding around his fingers like the tentacles of Ben’s monster wrapping around his poor victims. It’s still a mindfuck, seeing them like this, looking all of 15 years old and tangled together as if melding their minds and their powers has really transformed them into one single living being. 

He doesn’t know what’s going to happen – if they will find a way back into their old bodies, if Vanya is going to kill them all within the next week after they flush her meds down the toilet, if Skittles are still going to be a thing in an altered timeline, if perhaps simply wanting too much what he should not have will eventually be the death of him.

“Scoot over,” he says, voice rough, and swings his legs up on the mattress, ignoring the prickling heat of the blush creeping up his neck. 

The only thing he knows for certain is that he is going to do everything in his power to make sure that things go differently this time. And that this moment here is where it starts.


End file.
